In November 2015, the Guardian ran a story about how international NGOs (INGOs), such as Amnesty International and Oxfam are relocating their headquarters to the global south. This comes across as a novelty, in an age where most international development organizations, including the United Nations, are headquartered in Europe and North America, with the notable exception of Action Aid, which moved its head office to South Africa roughly a decade ago. In the piece, several INGOs discuss their impending relocation southward in a self-congratulatory tone.
The article begins poetically: “A hurricane is blowing through the world of international development and when the dust settles, the landscape is going to look entirely different.”
Will it? These shifts are described in revolutionary terms, but we fear that they will not alter the management problems within international development and human rights work, manifest in elitist decision-making and unequal resource-distribution. For the fact that organizations are often microcosms of larger-scale inequality, we would urge INGOs to ask themselves tough management questions as they move to tropical locales.
